Apple Named “Least Green” Tech Company by Greenpeace
Posted By Laura K. Cowan On April 21, 2011 @ 3:00 pm In Green Business,green technology,News | 5 Comments
[4]
Greenpeace [5] just named Apple the least green company on its list of tech firms [6] because of its reliance on dirty coal [7] to power the company’s data centers. Greenpeace’s report, “How Dirty Is Your Data?,” shows that Apple’s investment in a new data center in North Carolina will triple its electricity consumption, which is the same amount of electricity used by 80,000 U.S. homes. Sixty-two percent of the new data center’s energy will be supplied by coal, with 32% supplied by nuclear power [8].
[9]
Overall, Greenpeace’s report estimates that Apple relies on coal for 54.5% of its data center energy needs, but that’s not much more than Facebook’s 53.2%. The greenest tech companies listed in the report are Yahoo!, Google, and Amazon. Jonathan Koomey, a project scientist for the End-Use Forecasting Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [10], whose work was cited in the study, defended the IT industry against criticism: “The use of IT often reduces environmental impacts. When we compared greenhouse gas emissions for downloading music to buying it on a CD, for example, we found downloads reduced emissions 40-80%.”
What do you think of this report? Do the large data centers required for cloud computing help or harm the environment?
+ Greenpeace [5]
Via Guardian [11]
Photos © Yutaka Tsutano [12]
Article printed from Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building: http://inhabitat.com
URL to article: http://inhabitat.com/apple-named-least-green-tech-company-by-greenpeace/
URLs in this post:
[1] Tweet: http://twitter.com/share
[2] Share on Tumblr: http://www.tumblr.com/share
[3] Email: mailto:?subject=http://inhabitat.com/apple-named-least-green-tech-company-by-greenpeace/
[4] Image: http://inhabitat.com/apple-named-least-green-tech-company-by-greenpeace/rsz_apple-iphone/
[5] Greenpeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/
[6] tech firms: http://inhabitat.com/index.php?s=tech+firm
[7] dirty coal: http://inhabitat.com/index.php?s=dirty+coal
[8] nuclear power: http://inhabitat.com/index.php?s=nuclear
[9] Image: http://inhabitat.com/apple-named-least-green-tech-company-by-greenpeace/rsz_apple-iphone-ipad/
[10] End-Use Forecasting Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: http://enduse.lbl.gov/
[11] Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/21/apple-least-green-tech-company
[12] Yutaka Tsutano: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivyfield/
Click here to print.